About a Quarter of Tax Filers in U.S. “Lucky Duckies”

In the United States, about 25% of the people who file tax returns end up
owing absolutely nothing for the year (or even, thanks to the Earned Income
Tax Credit, less than nothing).

The Wall Street Journal famously called this class
of untaxed millions
lucky duckies,
who by foisting off the tax burden on the other 75% of America are thereby
presumably unconcerned with tax reform and government waste and other things
the Journal would rather we all be concerned with.
The Journal and others advocate for reforms that
would tax the lucky duckies along with everyone else, but the recent tax cuts
advocated by Bush and passed into law actually increased the number of ducks
in the pond.

I have a couple of observations about this surprising percentage of tax-free
citizens.

One: if so many people are doing this, mostly not
for reasons of conscience, why are so many people who do have strong
conscientious objections to how the government spends our money
failing to do this?

I can get some answers to this from pure self-examination, since for a long
time I was in the camp of people who thought they were in opposition to the
government and its policies while I was underwriting them all the while.

I hope on this site to examine and deflate some of the rationalizations I used
to justify my subsidy of the government, and other rationalizations that I
encounter.

Two: on the other hand, if the government can
tolerate having one in four “taxpayers” failing to pay taxes and it still has
enough money to build an incontestably vast and mighty arsenal, indulge its
prison fetish, et cetera, what hope
does tax resistance have for being much more than a sad, resigned, personal
gesture?

I have to wonder some days whether Dubya isn’t doing more to bankrupt the
government than an entire army of tax resisters would be able to accomplish.
It would take about six million of me, quitting our jobs and refusing to feed
the IRS,
to match the $87 billion Dubya just asked for to pay for the oddly unexpected
expenses in our never-ending war. To match the $300 billion deficit in the
budget Bush submitted to Congress this year — money that he’s effectively withholding from future Congresses (with
interest) — would take twenty million Picket Lines
like mine.

When I wrote this site’s
FAQ,
I noted that the “primary reason I chose this course of action was to stop
supporting the government personally — to wash my hands of it. It was born of
a selfish desire to live my life according to my principles, and not of a more
overarching agenda of regime change or reform.” But even so, I allowed myself
to fantasize: “What if 10% of the people who are of the opinion that
the war was a terrible mistake or that the government is run by a bunch of
crooks actually did as I’m doing and withdrew their support?”

And I’m afraid that maybe the answer is “maybe it still wouldn’t make much of
a difference.” On the other hand, I still think it beats writing an
ignore-o-gram to your Senator or waving a sign at the Civic Center. And if it
doesn’t do much good, at least it doesn’t do as much harm as paying the taxes
does.

I’ve added an annotated index to this
site, which might be helpful if you want to find some topic I’ve covered in
one of the entries but don’t know which date I wrote it on.

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.